Microsoft outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot worldwide

Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and Copilot were still down on Friday as one of the company’s worst outages stretched beyond 12 hours, disrupting communications for businesses and governments worldwide.

Microsoft blamed server problems for the outage and said it was not aware of any malicious activity. It said in its latest update on Friday that it was seeing signs of stabilization after implementing fixes more broadly to attain a persistent recovery of services.

The disruption hit government agencies in Australia, Japan, and the United States, and caused disruptions at trading firms, delays to companies publishing their results and airlines warning customers of delayed communication.

Trades had to be confirmed by fax

In Europe, stock exchange operator Euronext said its listing teams were experiencing email communication issues, while Britain’s insurer Aviva said it was putting backup plans in place for its earnings calls. Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers of delays to emails and updates.

US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said their email support services were impacted.

The outage also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers, and investment trust companies. One of the companies went as far as cancelling a bond repurchase transaction, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

Another Taiwanese financial company resorted to using fax to confirm trades, a second source said.

In the US, electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its results on Thursday to November 16, while Switzerland’s Richemont briefly delayed its first half results announcement on Friday.

Disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time

It is the second disruption to hit Microsoft’s 365 services this year.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely deal with the outage for now because few customers can walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight.

“The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands,” he said.

Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October last year. Last month, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Impact on email systems

Australian Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack.

“The impact that they are dealing with … is very much on email systems,” the minister added.

Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among organizations caught up in the outage on Friday.

The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft, while Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the outage was affecting the government’s information system infrastructure.

In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. Exchange Online is the company’s cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.